The gendered use of salirse in Mexican Spanish: Si … · The gendered use of salirse in Mexican Spanish: Si me salía yo con las amigas, se enojaba JESSI ELANA AARON Department of

The gendered use ofsalirsein Mexican Spanish:Si me salía yo con las amigas, se enojaba

J E S S I E L A N A A A R O N

Department of SpanishAND PortugueseMSC03 21001

University of New MexicoAlbuquerque, NM 87131

[email protected]

A B S T R A C T

It has been claimed that women and men use language quite differently insocial interaction. Combining a functional and cognitive approach to gram-mar, this article explores the ways in which men and women use the optionalpronominal form of the Spanish verbsalir(se)‘to leave’ in Mexican Span-ish. It is found that women use the pronominal form notably more thanmen, and that, diachronically, this form has traditionally been applied towomen’s behavior. It is hypothesized that these patterns demonstrate boththe relative expressive freedom of women’s speech and the socially con-strained nature of expectations for female behavior in colonial and contem-porary Mexican society. It is shown how culturally shaped conventionalconstruals of gender can both be reflected in and influence morphosyntacticphenomena. (Spanish, gender, energetic constructions.)*

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Studies of sociolinguistic variation, whether in social class, age, or gender, haveoffered linguists and society at large special insights into the communicative andsocial functions of language in everyday discourse.1 This variation is a subtleresource of the linguistic system which is used to express “social meaning –nuances of emotion, attitude, social identity – without actually stating it in somany words” (Eckert 1998:64).

Eckert & McConnell-Ginet (1998:484) call for an innovative perspective innew studies on language and gender, stating that “theoretical insight into how lan-guage and gender interact requires a close look at social practices in which theyare jointly produced.” Furthermore, they point out that “the danger . . . is that thereal force and import of their interaction [of language and gender] is erased whenwe abstract each uncritically from [these] social practices . . . in which they inter-mingle with other symbolic and social phenomena” (1998:485). Thus, social vari-ables and an understanding of the social reality are crucial to any study of the useand function of grammatical structures in everyday social interaction.

Language in Society33, 585–607. Printed in the United States of AmericaDOI: 10.10170S0047404504044045

© 2004 Cambridge University Press 0047-4045004 $12.00 585

The ways in which women and men use pragmatic options differently in dis-course is a topic that has been explored by various scholars (e.g. Coates 1993,1998; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1998). While some have argued that womenand men use the same pragmatic options (such as tag questions and hedges) withdifferent underlying functions (Tannen 1998, Coates 1993), others argue thatthese options serve the same purpose for both men and women, but that theiruses differ quantitatively (Eckert 1998, Cameron 1998). Most of these studiesfocus either on discourse markers, such as hedges, or on phonological variables,such as accent, and have proposed various motivations for gender variation,including separate subcultures for women and men, female subordination andmale dominance, and the favoring of symbolic capital. No study of which I amaware, however, has examined gender variation under a cognitive perspective inwhich a socially constituted, characteristic construal of scenes shapes distribu-tional patterns. This article explores this possibility, offering a new kind of expla-nation for gender variation not yet touched in the gender-and-language literature.

Although the hypothesis that conventional construals may shape gender vari-ation is new, the basic idea on which it stands – that morphosyntactic variationcan be constrained by socioculturally influenced construals – is not. Recently, anexciting volume of work entitledEthnosyntax(Enfield 2002) has explored therelationships among culture, construals, and variation. Enfield makes explicitthe inherent interconnectedness of language and culture (2002:22), stating:

Morphosyntactic devices which are not necessarily culture-specific in seman-tic terms – such as switch-reference systems and classifier constructions –may nevertheless beused differently, where those differences have culture-specific motivations. Thus, culture-specific uses of such non-culture-specificdevices may relate to the pragmatic effects of different ‘cultural premises’ . . .or to culture-specific semantics of the lexical items involved. (Enfield 2002:8,emphasis in original)

In other words, distributional patterns of morphosyntactic phenomena such assalir(se)‘to leave’ variation in Spanish may be explained through the examina-tion of sociocultural premises specific to the society in which the phenomena areconsidered. Gender, like other social constructs, is a candidate in helping to shapethese premises.

I will follow a functional-cognitive, variationist approach in the followinganalysis of the use of one verb in contemporary and colonial Mexican Spanish:salir(se). In Spanish intransitive verbs of motion, an option sometimes existsbetween using an unmarked (i.e., root intransitive) form or a pronominal form.2

The specific semantic and pragmatic implications of this choice differ from verbto verb. I will argue that Mexican women consistently choose the pronominalform of salir(se)more often than men, adding expressiveness and force to theirspeech, and demonstrating their relative freedom to use expressivity as speakers.Furthermore, I hypothesize that the pragmatic option of using the pronominal


586 Language in Society33:4 (2004)

form salirse, in contrast with the absolute formsalir, has since the 16th centuryreflected the constrained nature of socially acceptable or desirable behavior forMexican women.

The use of pronominal clitics with intransitive motion verbs, as inLa pelotase cayóde la mesa‘The ball [se] fell off the table’ orSe salióde la casa de sumamá cuando tenía catorce años‘She [se] left her mom’s house when she wasfourteen’, has been treated in diverse and often unsatisfactory ways by lin-guists writing on clitic phenomena. These constructions have been called“Romance reflexives” (García 1975), “inchoatives” (Mendikoetxea 1999:1639),“middle reflexives” (Klaiman 1992), “obligatory reflexives” (Silva-Corvalán1994:123; Gutiérrez & Silva-Corvalán 1993:77, 84), “refiningse (se de mati-zación)” (Butt & Benjamin 2000:358), “energetic constructions” (Maldonado1999:353–98), or, as Maldonado (1999:398) notes, labeled as “exceptions, devi-ations, or simply aberrations of Hispanic speech.”3 Because of the various andoften vague labels attached to these constructions, and the relatively little atten-tion they have received in the field, the numerous approaches to this phenom-enon leave much to be desired. As Maldonado points out, “Traditional Hispanicgrammars have held that the use ofse in intransitive constructions is eitherautomatic or it is trivialized to the point that the original expressive meaning ofthis form is so tenuous that it is almost imperceptible” (1999:356).

Traditionally, as can be deduced from the majority of the labels listed above,this use of the clitic has been understood as a type of reflexive. García 1975suggests that, just as the use of the reflexive pronoun in transitive constructionslowers the verb’s transitivity and thus the number of arguments, so too does itsuse with intransitives, making it impossible for the hearer to interpret the actionas having been caused by an outside agent. The basic function of a reflexive is to“[encode] . . . a referential identity between the two theta-roles assigned by atransitive verb, Agent and Theme (Patient)” (Klaiman 1992:38). As Maldonadoputs it,

There is a kind of shared consensus to analyze the occurrence of the cliticseas a problem of unaccusativity. If the ‘superficial’ object is represented by 2,that is, as patient object in the ‘deep structure,’ the promotion of 2 to 1 moti-vates the occurrence of the formse. (1999:377)

If this is the case, andseconstructions with intransitive motion verbs are to beconsidered a part of this category, then at least two participants (agent and patient)must be identifiable. This, however, is not possible for the types of constructionsdiscussed here, making this analysis highly inadequate.

Maldonado 1989, 1993, 1999 is the first to offer a thorough and enlighteningtreatment of this topic. Rejecting the idea that this is a simple problem of unac-cusativity, simplification, over-generalization, analogy, or loss of meaning, hesuggests instead that these are “energetic constructions” that focus on the action,either by emphasizing the moment in which the subject suffers a change of state,

G E N D E R E D U S E O FS A L I R S E I N M E X I C A N S PA N I S H

Language in Society33:4 (2004) 587

or by showing it to be against the normal expectations or desires of the speaker(Maldonado 1999:353–62). Butt & Benjamin (2000:358–72) draw much of theiranalysis of what they call the “refiningse” from Maldonado’s approach. As Lan-gacker 1994 and others (e.g. Maldonado 1999, Talmy 1985) have noted, theseexpectations may very well be social or cultural: “Quite a number of grammati-cal phenomena are in one way or another sensitive to cultural expectations. Theysomehow reflect culturally determined conceptions of what constitutes afamil-iar scenario, acanonical situation, or anormal course of events” (Lan-gacker 1994:39; emphasis in original).

The work done thus far on these constructions (and in construal literature ingeneral), however, has been based almost entirely on invented or anecdotal exam-ples. This kind of evidence does not allow for exploration of patterns of varia-tion in everyday language use, and thus it can provide only a partial explanationof these constructions’ meanings. This essay, like other recent works, considersthe semantics ofsalirseas falling into an energetic constructions framework, butI will test this hypothesis with variationist methodology. It is only through theuse of empirical data and statistical analyses (cf. Diller & Khanittanan 2002:48;Barlow & Kemmer 2000) that we can develop a fuller understanding of both thecognitive and the social processes that mold patterns of gender variation in theuse ofsalir(se).

C O R P U S A N D M E T H O D O L O G Y

This study includes data from two corpora: (i) theDocumentos lingüísticos de laNueva España: Altiplano central(Company Company 1994; henceforth DLNE),a corpus of approximately 320 written documents dating from 1535 to 1818,with a word count of approximately 260,000; and (ii)El habla popular de laCiudad de México: Materiales para su estudio(Lope Blanch 1976), a 172,699-word corpus that includes guided interviews with one or two informants, as wellas a section of surreptitiously recorded conversations, all done in Mexico City.4

I elected to work with the DLNE due to the fact that these documents were cho-sen because of their approximation to the spoken language of the time. As Com-pany Company, who compiled the corpus, notes:

The work is made up fundamentally of materials that are colloquial in nature,that come a bit closer – inasmuch as written language is a reflection of spokenlanguage – to the speech of the Mexican colonial period. Though it is difficultto define the term ‘colloquial,’ and even more so for written language, I selecteddocuments that showed, it seemed to me, a more fluid syntax. (1994:5)

Thus, though DLNE is a written corpus, it is not a literary corpus (a collection offormal writing), and thus it does not necessarily reflect only the trained writingof the more formally educated. The documents in the DLNE are made up of fourprincipal types: letters, court testimonies, inventories and wills, and petitions



and reports.5 The majority of the court testimonies are transcriptions of the oraltestimonies of often illiterate citizens, and as such they are far more representa-tive than literary corpora that include only the writings of literate elite males(cf. Seed 1988:10–11). With this in mind, it seems appropriate also to examinethe most representative corpus of modern Mexican Spanish available:El hablapopular de la Ciudad de México(Lope Blanch 1976), henceforth referred to asUNAM. Table 1 shows a summary of the documents used from the DLNE.

I counted and coded all occurrences ofsalir and salirse in the DLNE andUNAM. In the DLNE, only documents that had an occurrence ofsalir(se)wereincluded, leaving a total of 119 documents. The 16th-century DLNE corpusincluded 22 documents, yielding 62 instances ofsalir(se). The 17th-century cor-pus included 44 documents, with a total of 108 tokens. The 18th century included43 documents with 77 tokens, and the 19th century had 10 documents and 14tokens. The 20th-century UNAM corpus yielded a total of 289 occurrences ofsalir(se). Once the tokens were extracted, each was coded according to the inde-pendent variables of aspect, person, clause type, parallel processing, referentsex0animacy, referent number, and semantic context. Owing to the low numberof tokens for the 16th through 19th centuries, detailed statistical analysis was notused on these occurrences. For the 20th-century data, however, GoldVarb 2001,a multiple regression variable-rule analysis program, was used to analyze thedata, the results of which are given in the following section.6

R E S U L T S

Before moving on to the gendered ways in whichsalir(se)variation is mani-fested in Mexican speech, we must first establish that the use of the pronominalform is, in fact, optional. Synchronically, the pronominal form can be used, evenprescriptively, in various contexts. Below is the 2001Diccionario de la RealAcademia Española(henceforth DRAE) definition for this form7:

1. intransitive. Pass from inside to outside.Salió de la casa a las ocho‘Sheleft the house at eight’. Used also as pronominal.

2. intransitive. Show or initiate something unexpectedly.Salir con la preten-sión, con la demanda, con la amenaza‘Come out with the pretension, thelawsuit, the threat’. Used also as pronominal.

3. intransitive. Move away from or separate oneself from something or belacking in it in what is necessary or due.Salió de la regla, de tono‘Hewent against the rule, the tone’. Used also as pronominal.

4. pronominal. Said of the contents of a container: To spill due to a crack orbreak.El agua se salió del vaso‘The water spilled out of the glass’.

5. pronominal. Said of a liquid: Boil over.Se ha salido la leche‘The milk hasboiled over’.

6. pronominal. Said of a container or depository: To have some crack or breakthrough which the contents spill.Este cántaro se sale‘This container spills’.



7. pronominal. In some games, to do the moves or plays necessary to win.8. pronominal. archaic. Initiate intervention in a fight or a cause either as a

fiscal or as a party.

As we can see, the prescriptive use ofsalirse falls into two basic categories:unexpected (either physically or socially deviating from the expected or desiredorder of events, as in definitions 2–6), and not unexpected (definitions 1, 7,and 8). As Maldonado 1999 notes, this construction can be used to signal thesubjective experience or interpretation of the speaker, indicating that the eventor action was against her (or society’s) expectations. He also correctly points outthat “expectations are based on our knowledge about the canonical structure ofworld events, behavioral patterns of society and other kinds of norms. Eventscontradicting our world view are thus prompt to have negative connotations”(Maldonado 1993:549). The unexpected uses can be further understood as madeup of both physically abnormal (4–6) and socially abnormal (2 and 3) events.Uses fitting definitions 1–6 all appear in my data, though not always in the pro-nominal form. I also found thatsalirsewas sometimes used in contexts otherthan these six possibilities: with abrupt movements (included in tables with‘unexpected’) and with permanent abandonment. The context of leaving an orga-nization, which is the context most cited in recent literature (e.g. Silva-Corvalán1994) as one in which the use of the pronominal form is obligatory, occurredonly once in the data (indeed, in the pronominal form). Because of its relativelylow frequency and semantic proximity to the noncontrastive ‘leave’, this occur-rence was included in the ‘leave’ category. Furthermore, there were two largersemantic categories in which the pronominal form was never used: to end up orturn out, and to cost, as seen in example (1).8 These two meanings are related, inthat ‘cost’ could also be understood as a particular type of ‘ending up’. It isunclear why the pronominal form has not yet extended to these meanings inthese data, but it has been found to be used in the ‘end up’ context, albeit rarely,in northern New Mexican Spanish (Aaron 2003).9

(1) Obligatory non-pronominal expressiona. Pero para quesaliera lila, o color de rosa o azul, le poníamos anelina [anilina] a la

tierra. (UNAM 147, 1976)10

‘But so that it would [Ø] come out lilac, or rose-colored, or blue, we would put aniline inthe soil.’

b. Compraba yo boletos, ¿no?, que diezsalíanpor uno veinte ¿no?; los boletos del metro aErmita. (UNAM 134, 1976)‘I would buy tickets, right?, and ten [Ø] cost one twenty, right?; the metro tickets to Ermita.’

All other categories showed variation in clitic use, shown in Table 2.In order to explore the possible influence of other factors on the use of the

pronominal formsalirse in the 20th century, I subjected the data to multipleregression analysis using GoldVarb; the results can be seen in Table 3. GoldVarbis a computerized statistical program that allows the comparison of the influenceof numerous noninteracting factors on a particular variable. Within each factor



TABLE 1. Summary of DLNE documents used by document type and raceof author or witness.

Spanish0Creole Mestizo Indian

Black0Mulatto

Other0Unknown All

N % N % N % N % N % N %

Sixteenth century

Testimony 7 78 1 11 1 11 0 – 0 – 9 41

Personal letter0note 4 100 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 4 18

Official letter 8 100 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 8 36

Petition0report 1 100 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 1 5

Inventory 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 –

Other 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 –

Seventeenth century

Testimony 21 72 2 7 4 14 2 7 0 – 29 66


Official letter 4 100 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 4 9

Petition0report 2 67 0 – 1 33 0 – 0 – 3 7

Inventory 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 –

Other 1 100 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 1 2

Eighteenth century

Testimony 24 73 2 6 6 18 0 – 1 3 33 77


Official letter 5 100 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 5 12

Petition0report 1 100 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 1 2

Inventory 1 100 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 1 2

Other 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 –

Nineteenth Century

Testimony 1 17 1 17 4 67 0 – 0 – 6 60


Official letter 2 100 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 2 20

Petition0report 1 100 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 1 10

Inventory 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 –

Other 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 –

All

Testimony 53 69 6 8 15 19 2 3 1 1 77 65


Official letter 19 100 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 19 16

Petition0report 5 83 0 – 1 17 0 – 0 – 6 5

Inventory 1 100 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 1 1

Other 1 100 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 1

Total 94 79 6 5 16 13 2 2 1 1 119 100



TABLE 2. Proportion of pronominal forms by semanticcontext in 20th century. All differences betweensalir

andsalirsewithin each semantic context are significantat p , .01, except Cost (p5 .0831) and Permanentabandonment (p5 .0172). All differences between

semantic contexts are significant at p, .01, except Turnout/Leave (p5 .0674), Cost/Leave (p5 .3353), and

Cost/Permanent abandonment (p5 .0145).15

Nsalir

Nsalirse

%salirse

Turn out 51 0 0Cost 14 0 0Leave 150 10 6Permanent abandonment 18 9 33Unexpected 7 30 81

Total 240 49 17

TABLE 3. GoldVarb results with pronominal form as applicationvalue (20th century). Factor groups not selected as significant:

aspect, grammatical person, referent sex/animacy, referentnumber, speaker age, interview type. p5 0.012

Factor%

salirse Weight%

of data

Semantic contextUnexpected0escape0abrupt 81 .97 16Permanent abandonment 33 .76 12Leave 6 .28 71Range 69

Clause TypeMain 26 .61 74Subordinate 7 .22 25Range 39

Parallel ProcessingYes 46 .79 18No 15 .42 81Range 37



group – for example, semantic context – each factor must present variation. If afactor does not present variation in the dependent variable, then it must be excludedfrom analysis. This was the case, for example, with the semantic context of ‘cost’(see ex. 1) in these data: It occurred only withsalir, never withsalirse. The removalof nonvariable factors is an important part of the analysis, for it ensures a greaterlikelihood of the correct identification of the hierarchy of constraints that affectthe dependent variable only in contexts in which either variant of the dependentvariable, in this casesalir or salirse, could possibly be chosen.

Once nonvariable factors have been removed, the researcher must select anapplication value, which is one of the two variants of the dependent variable. Inthis case, I chosesalirse.11 Once this is done, GoldVarb selects the factor groupsthat have a statistically significant effect on the dependent variable. Each factoris given a weight between 0 and 1, such that any weight above 0.5 favors the useof the application value, while any weight below 0.5 disfavors it. The further theweight is from 0.5, the stronger the effect of this factor. These weights determinethe hierarchy of constraints, the “grammar,” so to speak (Poplack & Taglia-monte 2001:92–93), underlyingsalir(se)variation. Each factor group, in turn,has a range of factor weights, determined by subtracting the weight of the lowestfactor in the group from that of the highest. For semantic context, for example,the range is 97 minus 28, or 69. These ranges show the magnitude of the effect ofa factor group on the dependent variable: The higher the range, the stronger theeffect of that factor group. In my data, the semantic context group was the mostinfluential, with a range of 69, compared to the weakest significant factor group,parallel processing, with a range of 37. In this study, factors not selected as sig-nificant for the 20th century include aspect, person, referent sex0animacy, refer-ent number, speaker age, and interview type.

Besides inherent variation in nearly all semantic contexts, another reason tobelieve that the use of the pronominal form is indeed a pragmatic option notdetermined by semantics alone is that it appears significantly more often in mainclauses than the bare form does. In Table 3, we can see that main clauses favorclitic occurrence with a weight of 0.61, and subordinate clauses strongly disfa-vor the clitic, with a weight of 0.22.12

Yet another factor pointing to the optional nature of clitic use is the statis-tically significant effect of parallel processing in contemporary data. Poplack1980 found that the elision of0s0 in Puerto Rican Spanish was strongly favoredby the elision of the previous0s0, and even more so by the elision of the pre-vious two 0s0s’. She called this phenomenon a “parallel processing effect”(Poplack 1980). Pereira Scherre (2001:91), who stresses the importance of “con-sider[ing] preceding markers across linear position as well as other importantconstraints,” found similar results in her study of0s0 aspiration and elision inBrazilian Portuguese.

For these data, I considered this same effect, counting as a possible source ofparallel processing the presence of the same clitic form (with or without the



same referent) as the one possible withsalir(se)within the last two clauses ofspeech. I did not count discourse markers such astú sabes‘you know’ as inde-pendent clauses. In Table 3, we can see that this effect is statistically significantin the 20th-century data. The presence of the same form in the two precedingclauses favors the occurrence of the pronominal formsalirsewith a weight of0.79, while its absence disfavorssalirsewith a weight of 0.42.13 This shows thatnot only semantic and syntactic factors, but also the properties of the surround-ing discourse, play a role in the speaker’s choice to use a clitic.

Speaker sex and clitic variation

Now that we have sufficiently established that the pronominal0absolute choiceis a true choice, we may consider it as a tool that differently gendered speakersmay use in different ways, either qualitatively or quantitatively, in order to achievethe desired pragmatic effect. As shown in Table 4, women in the 20th-centurysample used significantly more pronominal forms than men did. A total of 69%of all salirseoccurrences were produced by female speakers. Furthermore, whilemen chose the pronominal form only 10% of the time, women chose it 24% ofthe time.

These totals in themselves, however, tell us relatively little about how womenand men are using this pronominal form. Does women’s elevated use happenonly in certain semantic or pragmatic contexts? Does one sex favor contexts thatdo not seem to allow variation? For this study, occurrences were divided intofive semantic categories: (i) to cost, (ii) unexpected, (iii) permanent abandon-ment, (iv) to leave (noncontrastive with the nonpronominal form, with no appar-ent semantic value beyond the basic semantics of the verb), and (v) to turn out orend up. Examples 2–4 below provide instances of tokens in each category inwhich the pronominal form occurred. Examples for nonvariable contexts ‘cost’and ‘turn out0end up’ can be found in (1) above.

TABLE 4. Pronominal use by speaker sex. Differences betweenfemale and male are significant at p5 .0013.

Female Male

N

%within

sex

%withintype N

%within

sex

%withintype

TotalN

Salir 106 76 44 134 90 56 240Salirse 34 24 69 15 10 31 49

Total N 140 149 289



(2) ‘unexpected’a. . . .es que el más grande, por burrito . . . tampoco no . . . Se salíade la escuela, señora!

Luego me mandaba el director: “Señora, este. . . ” (UNAM 411, 1976)‘. . .it’s that the oldest, because he was being stupid . . . didn’t either . . . -He would [se]leave school, ma’am! Then the principal would tell me: “Ma’am, um. . . ” ’

b. . . . selastimó . . . este . . . Unhuesosele salió aquí, del hombro, y este . . . Venía en la bici-cleta dando la vuelta. . . (UNAM 204, 1976)‘. . .he got hurt . . . um. . . Abone [se] came out here, from his shoulder, and um. . . He wascoming on his bicycle turning around . . .

(3) ‘permanent’a. . . .por atendera . . . a tu familia, pste has tenido quesalir de estos . . .este . . .lugares . . .

(UNAM 239, 1976)‘. . .in order to attend to . . . toyour family, well, you [te] have had to leave these . . . um. . .places . . . ’

b. Entonces, este . . . a él no le parecía . . . e . . . por el . . .chamaco también, que traía la señora.Y se salióde su casa. Entonces, este . . .encontró a una muchacha que era huérfana tam-bién de papá y mamá. . . (UNAM 22, 1976)‘So, um. . . hedidn’t like it . . . uh . . .because of the . . . boy,too, that the lady had. And he[se] left her house. Then, um. . . hefound a girl who was also an orphan, with no father ormother . . . ’

c. Para que encuentres la felicidad, voy asalirmede tu vida. (Aguilar 1992)‘So that you find happiness, I am going to leave [me] your life.’

(4) ‘leave’a. Así es que me levanto, me salgopor ai un rato, a la calle. (UNAM 89, 1976)

‘So I get up, I [me] go out and around for a while, to the street.’b. Estaba la valla, como tres cuadras alrededor de ese kínder, esperándolo. Pues yome salí,

compré mi . . . mishojas, compré mi sobre, y venía enseñando por todo mundo. . . (UNAM108, 1976)‘The gate was there, like three blocks around that kindergarten, waiting for him. Well, I[me] went out, bought my. . . my papers, bough-, my envelope, and I went around showingeverybody . . . ’

In Table 5, we can see that men do indeed seem to speak more about contexts inwhich variation does not occur. Though the total occurrence ofsalir(se) forwomen and men is about equal, at 149 and 140 tokens respectively, men win outin the nonvariable contexts, producing 55% of the ‘turn out’ tokens, and a whop-ping 93% of the ‘cost’ tokens. Women, on the other hand, win out in two of thelarge variable contexts, producing 59% of the ‘permanent’ tokens, and 68% ofthe ‘unexpected’ tokens. Both sexes were about even in their production of ‘leavetokens.’

These semantic context preferences, however, do not tell the whole story.Women, within each variable context, favored the pronominal form more thanmen did in the same context. As Table 6 indicates, in the ‘permanent’ context,women used the clitic 44% of the time, while men used it only 18% of the time.Again, in the ‘unexpected’ context, women use the pronominal form 88% of thetime, compared to men’s 67%. Women show almost no difference from men inthe use of the pronominal form in the ‘leave’ context, producing it only 1% morethan men.

Why would women, speaking about the same semantic context as men, chooseto use the pronominal form so much more often? A possible explanation for the



TABLE 5. Cross-tabulation of speaker sex and semantic context. Nodifferences between male and female speakers within semantic

context significant at p, .01, except Cost. For Unexpected context,p 5 .0127.

Female Male

N

%within

sex

%withincontext N

%within

sex

%withincontext

TotalN

Cost 1 1 7 13 9 93 14Unexpected 25 18 68 12 8 32 37Permanent 16 11 59 11 7 41 27Leave 75 54 47 85 57 53 159Turn out 23 16 45 28 19 55 51

Total N 140 149 289

TABLE 6. Cross-tabulation of clitic use by speaker sex and semantic context. No sexdifferences in use ofsalirseby semantic context significant at p, .01.

Female Male Total

Context Form N % N % N %

Turn out salirse 0 0 0 0 0 0salir 23 100 28 100 51 100Total 23 28 51

Cost salirse 0 0 0 0 0 0salir 1 100 13 100 14 100Total 1 13 14

Leave salirse 5 7 5 6 10 6salir 70 93 80 94 150 94Total 75 85 160

Permanent salirse 7 44 2 18 9 33salir 9 56 9 82 18 67Total 16 11 27

Unexpected salirse 22 88 8 67 30 81salir 3 12 4 33 7 19Total 25 12 37

Total salirse 34 24 15 10 49 17salir 106 76 134 90 240 83Total 140 149 289



elevated frequency ofsalirsein women’s speech could be that they tend to havedifferent topics of conversation than men. This does appear to be the case, as canbe seen in Table 7. Here, we see that, while men were most likely to talk aboutinanimate objects (48% of all men’s tokens), women were most likely to talkabout women (36% of all women’s tokens). Furthermore, men produced 69% ofthe inanimate referents and 67% of the masculine referents, and women pro-duced 96% of the female referents. Only with animate (sex unknown) referentswere the percentages for each sex about equal.

In Table 8, we can see that inanimates are the referent group least likely totake the pronominal form, at 9%, followed by animates at 11%, masculine refer-ents at 25%, and feminine referents at 32%. Differences in topic choice, again,then, may partially explain the elevated relative frequency ofsalirsein women’sspeech. Interestingly, however, as we see in Table 8, women still produce morepronominal forms than men within the same category of inanimate, animate, andfeminine referents. Only with masculine referents do men have a slight tendencyto use the pronominal form more often than women.

Social meanings

Thus far, we have seen that neither semantic context nor topic choice alone is anadequate explanation for the elevated use of the pronominal form by women.Given this fact, a pragmatic explanation would perhaps be the most plausible,especially given the pragmatic possibilities offered by energetic constructionssuch assalirse. Why, then, within this framework, would both female speakersand female referents exhibit such an elevated occurrence of the pronominal0energetic form? Let us look at a few examples with female referents and speak-ers from the UNAM corpus, shown in (5):

TABLE 7. Cross-tabulation of speaker sex and referent animacy/sex.All differences between female and male speakers within referent

animacy significant at p, .01, except Animate (p5 .4762).

Female Male

N

%within

sex

%within

animacy N

%within

sex

%within

animacyTotal

N

Inanimate 32 23 31 72 48 69 104Animate 37 26 52 34 23 48 71Male 20 14 33 41 28 67 61Female 51 36 96 2 1 4 53

Total N 140 149 289



(5) Female speaker0female referenta. Siempre me dice, “Voy al cine”, y luego nomas ni viene. Y luego, sime salíayo con las

amigas, se enojaba. Me regañaba: “No; no debes de salir. Tú debes estar en tu casa”.(UNAM 59, 1976)‘He always says to me, “I’m going to the movies,” and then he doesn’t even come. Andthen, if I [me] went out with my [girl]friends, he would get mad. He would scold me: “No;you shouldn’t go out. You should be in your house.”

b. . . .dijo: “Mire, mamá–dijo-: se saliópara en casa Andrea -dijo-. Se saliópara en casaAndrea”, que le decía. Y entonces dice . . . que laagarra mi mamá. . . (UNAM 207, 1976)‘. . .she said: “Look, Mom – she said-: she [se] left for Andrea’s house –she said-. She [se]left for Andrea’s house”, she was telling her. And so she says . . . and my momgrabs her . . . ’

c. Yo decía: “Pos si me voy pa la casa, mi papá me va a pegar, porqueme salí”. Eso yadespués pensaba yo. (UNAM 208, 1976)‘I would say: “Well, if I go home, my dad’s gonna hit me, because I [me] went out.” ThatI would think later.’

In these examples, we can see clearly the social implications ofsalirse, inwhich the female subject has done something displeasing to a higher author-ity of some sort, in these cases either a male lover or a parent. This context,of course, also happens with male subjects, but much less frequently. In (6),

TABLE 8. Cross-tabulation of clitic use by speaker sex andreferent animacy/sex. No differences between male and femalespeakers in use ofsalirseby referent animacy are significant at

p , .01, except Inanimate. No differences between referenttypes in clitic reference are significant at p, .01, except

Inanimate/Masculine, Inanimate/Feminine, andAnimate/Feminine.

Female Male Total

Animacy Form N % N % N %

Inanimate salirse 7 22 2 3 9 9salir 25 78 70 97 95 91Total 32 72 104

Animate salirse 6 16 2 6 8 11salir 31 84 32 94 63 89Total 37 34 71

Masculine salirse 4 20 11 27 15 25salir 16 80 30 73 46 75Total 20 41 61

Feminine salirse 17 33 0 0 17 32salir 34 67 2 100 36 68Total 51 2 53

Total salirse 34 24 15 10 49 17salir 106 76 134 90 240 83Total 140 149 289



for example, the subject is male, though he is not a full-grown man buta boy:

(6) Male speaker0male referentMe escondía yo de mis padres, me salíayo por ai. Enc. -Sí. ¿Nunca le pegaron sus padres?Inf. -Desgraciadamente . . . ps. . . (UNAM 85, 1976)‘I would hide from my parents, I would [me] go out and around. Interviewer. –Yes. Did yourparents ever hit you? Informant. –Unfortunately . . . well . . . ’

Here, again, the pronominal form is used to indicate purposeful violation ofauthoritarian expectations, and it implies social and physical repercussions forthis violation. Though this context withsalirseis used for referents of both sexes,salirsein general is much more common with female referents (see Table 8).

As Maldonado notes, “The fact thatseis used to mark some type of acciden-tality has been well pointed out in the relevant literature (Real Academia Española1978, Benot 1910, Molina Redondo 1974, Moliner 1966, García 1975, Mal-donado 1988)” (1993:531). Similarly, Schmitz argues that “these me, se lecon-struction is used with involuntary physiological or emotional reactions” (Schmitz1966:431). Not surprisingly, then, this is the only contrastive semantic categorythat has been present since the 16th century in the texts I examined. Example (7)provides instances of this category for each time period, excluding the 19th cen-tury, which, owing to the extremely small size of the corpus, does not presentany occurrences ofsalirsebeing used with this context:

(7) ‘defiance of social norms or desires’c. Y el dicho Moreno respondió que él savía el porqué, y lo daria firmado de su nombre,

porque savía de diez y seis o diez y siete monjas quese avian salidode monasterios preña-das y paridas. (DLNE 162053, 1576)‘And the said Moreno responded that he knew the reason why, and he would give it signedwith his name, because he knew of sixteen or seventeen nuns who [se] had left the mon-astery pregnant and given birth.’

d. . . .en esta su delaçion estaba fuera de su juizio, por aber padesido enfermeda de opresionesen el corason, nasidas de pesadunbres por aber enbargado a su padre por aberes reales;tanto que en una ocassionse salioa la calle desnuda de medio cuerpo parariba, con la cam-issa caida. Y la hente de su casa la entró en hella a toda prisa. (DLNE 172176, 1697)‘in this accusation of hers she was out of her judgment, due to having suffered sicknessfrom oppressions in the heart, born from the guilt of having withheld from her father forroyal belongings; so much that on one occasion she [se] went out to the street naked fromthe mid-body up, with her shirt fallen. And the people of her house took her into it hurriedly.’

e. . . .no ha avido forma de obedecer, ocupando muchas horas en esta tarea;saliendosedeldormitorio a deshoras, siendo esto causa de espantarse algunas religiosas con sus sali-das; peleandose en otras ocasiones porque le den la llabe del ambulatorio . . . (DLNE181226, 1747)‘there has not been a way to obey, occupying many hours in this task; leaving [se] thebedroom at all hours, being this cause of the shock of some religious [women] with heroutings; fighting on other occasions for them to give her the key to the dispensary . . . ’

These examples are, in fact, the prototypical example for what Maldonado 1989,1993, 1999 terms “energetic constructions.” In energetic constructions, the expec-tations of the speaker play a part in the formation of the construction. In thiscase, the pronominal form is used when an event is either undesired or unexpected.



A typical example of this phenomenon is with the verbcaer(se)‘to fall.’ If a ballfalls off a table, it is most common to sayLa pelotase cayóde la mesa‘The ball[se] fell off the table’. If, on the other hand, a ball falls from the hoop in a bas-ketball game, an expected event perfectly natural according to physical laws, noclitic is typically used:La pelotacayóde la canasta‘The ball [Ø] fell from thebasket’ (Maldonado 1999).

In (7) above, the events described go against societal norms and thus areunexpected, though each case may have been anticipated by the speaker. Thistype of unexpectedness could be considered a social manifestation of what Talmy1985 and Maldonado frame in physical terms as a “force dynamic”:

For changes to be able to take place, some type of energy must act on a deter-mined element. Before the action takes place there can be some type of resis-tance that controls the state of the element that will be affected. This creates asituation offorce dynamic, as Talmy (1985) proposes, in which the ener-getic element (theantagonist) imposes a change in another element (theagonist) by blocking or abating the force with which the element remainedin a particular state, before the energy acted on it . . . . In this type of energeticconstruction there can also be an abstract confrontation of a force dynamic. Ingeneral terms, the natural expectations regarding different events in the worldconstitute the initial force which a specific event confronts. (Maldonado1999:375)

As Maldonado notes, “The expectations [of the speaker] are based on the knowl-edge shared by a community about the canonical structure of world events,social behavioral norms, and other types of norms” (1999:380). A social inter-pretation of the use of the pronominal form in cases like those shown in (7)offers the clearest explanation, as well as a prototypical example of the ener-getic construction.

A diachronic perspective

The socially deviant context, as mentioned above, is the only one to appear inthese data since the 16th century. Yet another reason to believe that the ener-getic construction withsalirsewas already present in the 16th century is thatthis – and only this – meaning is attested in the 1611 version ofTesoro de lalengua Castellana o Española(Covarrubias 1943:922). Here,salirse, listedtogether with the lexical entrysalir, is used in the following way: “for a glassto salirse means it spills;salirse out of what has been established, to haveregrets;salirse from the religion, renounce the habit.” This meaning is evenclearer in theRAE usual 1780(Real Academia Española 1780), which includesthe following contrastive definitions:

Salir con la suya. To get what one attempts to, when there are barriers toaccomplish it.In contentione vincere, voti compotem evadere.



Salirse con la suya. Stay stubbornly in one’s point of view or behavior againstthe advice and desires of others.Contra ceterorum vota persistere, perseverare.

The second definition, which uses the pronominal form, contrasts with the firstin that a social and moral implication is given to the action. Another piece ofevidence for the established social0moral meaning ofsalirsecan be found in theRAE usual 1791(Real Academia Española 1791), which has an entry for thefollowing proverb:

Salíme al sol, dixe mal, y oí peor. ‘I went out [me] into the sun, I said bad, andI heard worse.’

The definition for this entry says, “Refrain that denounces meetings and get-togethers in which things are whispered and outside groups are censured, andrecommends staying inside and modesty.” The contradiction of social norms con-text appears to be both a very early and a quite widespread use of the pronominalform, and it has continued as such up to the present day. The current popularexpressionte sales‘you exaggerate, you’re going over the top’ is another exam-ple of this use. Synchronically, the socially deviant0unexpected context is theone that most favors the use of the clitic, with a GoldVarb factor weight of 0.97(see Table 3).

Given the common social implications ofsalirse, it is interesting to note inquantitative terms the gendered way in which it has been used diachronically: ittends to refer to female behaviors and actions. This tendency is strikingly evi-dent in a definition forsalirsetaken from the 1959Diccionario de mejicanismos(Santamaría 1959:956, emphasis mine):

1. Salirse, pronominal. For a woman to abandon the family house.

2. Salirse uno del huacal, figurative expression. Take an aggressive attitude,lose patience, lack due composure.

3. Salirse del fuste, Said of an excessively provocative and dishonest womanwho insinuates more to a man than is appropriate.

Remarkably, of the three uses ofsalirselisted in this dictionary, two of them aresaid to refer specifically to women. The data too show a consistently elevatedlevel of use with animate female referents. As is shown in Table 9, the likelihoodthat a female referent will be involved in asalirseconstruction is higher thanthat for all other referents in my sample since the 16th century. One possibility isthat this favoring of female referents could occur because, as women’s behaviorin Mexico is more strictly regulated and controlled than men’s (and has been formany centuries in Western and many other cultures), they are more likely to beseen as overstepping social norms or expectations. In colonial New Spain, patri-archalism, though not monolithic, “was a powerful and persuasive ideology insociety at large,” and served as the “dominant metaphor for a variety of hierar-



chies . . . that were organized upon the principles of patrons and clients and cutacross social and ethnic boundaries” (Seed 1988:7). Women were, of course,divided by factors of race and class, and what was expected of a lady of thenobility was certainly different in both qualitative and quantitative terms fromwhat was expected of a slave or servant (Gonzalbo 1985:12).

The world of women in New Spain was not static; as the ideals and exigen-cies of those with influence and power changed, so did the face of patriarchy(Gonzalbo 1985:12). Despite these differences and societal transformations, how-ever, women across ethnic and class groups, and even across centuries, wereunited by the experience of patriarchal repression in its varied manifestations(Arenal & Schlau 1989:1; Gonzalbo 1985:12; Schlau 1996:183; Seed 1998:7).This force was often most clearly seen in ideals articulated in documents pro-duced by colonial authorities, such as Inquisition documents like those in theDLNE. In these and other documents of the time, women were expected to besubmissive to their husbands and superiors (Gonzalbo 1985:12), silent (Chin-chilla 1996), secluded (Arenal & Schlau 1989:1), and inactive in public life andpublic spaces (Chinchilla 1996:37; Gonzalbo 1985:13). Along with social spaces,women’s physical spaces were also limited:

Physical space in the home was extremely confined during this period [the16th,17th, and 18th centuries]. A room of one’s own was to be found only in somemonastic cells. The quarters allotted to women, even in the homes of the nobil-ity, were often cramped and easily accessible to men of the family and maleservants. All domestic space was shared. Women were not allowed in all roomsand frequently had only cushions, not chairs, to sit on. Both the objects in thehome and the women themselves belonged to the men. (Arenal & Schlau1989:3)

These restrictions on the ideal woman’s physical and social behavior producedin the literature “a social subject always in hiding, multifaceted and reticent, thatalmost never is revealed upon a first reading and that inhabits primarily the mar-

TABLE 9. Use ofsalirseas percentage of totalsalir(se)tokens by century according toreferent sex and animacy. Differences between male and female referents are significantat p , .01 for 16th and 17th centuries. All other differences are not significant. Animate

and Inanimate figures, due to the dearth of tokens, were not tested for significance.

Century16

% salirse(N)17

% salirse(N)18

% salirse(N)19

% salirse(N)20

% salirse(N)

inanimate 0 (008) 0 (0012) 0 (0015) 0 (002) 8 (90104)animate 0 (0014) 12 (108) 14 (107) 0 (001) 11 (8071)male 5 (2039) 9 (4044) 27 (8029) 18 (2011) 24 (16051)female 100 (101) 31 (14044) 30 (8026) – (000) 32 (17053)



gins and lives in between the lines of masculine discourses” (Moraña 1996:8).These ideals had an enormous effect on how the behaviors and activities of realwomen in colonial Spanish America were perceived:

The living and discursive space of the colonial woman was always a limitedconfine controlled by strategies and rhetorics that assigned to her precise andunavoidable values and functions destined to confirm and strengthen the placeof Power. . . . For this reason as well, her activity is always seen as transgres-sive, limited and belligerent, hermodus operandias allegorical, reticent orparadoxical, and her achievements like the tip of an iceberg whose base issunk in the dark waters of a history that, like the riches of America, becameforeign before it could begin to be her own. (Moraña 1996:7–8)

Despite the hegemonic nature of these discourses, it is a mistake to assume thatthese attempts at social and physical control of women’s lives were always, oreven mostly, successful; in practice, women were not always bound to these ide-als. In fact, rich and impoverished women alike were often active in public life,including commerce, religion, and recreation (Gonzalbo 1985:13–14). How-ever, since women in colonial Spanish America were less likely than men to beliterate (Arenal & Schlau 1989), and their writings mostly remain unpublished,our access to the words and stories of these women is often not direct – it is oftenmediated by the pen of the literate males who transcribed women’s words indocuments like those in the DLNE. By both asking the questions and havingultimate control over the written product, male transcribers in the Inquisitionmaintained their hegemony, and through their language we find “as much revealedabout social norms and hopes for each sex as in religious papers and dogma”(Schlau 1996:183).

In modern Mexico, these discourses have not disappeared (Boyer 1991:271).Pacheco Ladrón de Guevara (1993:32) invokes the laments of colonial poet SorJuana Inés de la Cruz to describe the situation of women in the State of Mexicotoday, who, she argues, face injustice and inequality in employment, health, andeducation. Olivera Campirán (1992:274) notes that the few woman-dominatedprofessional careers in Mexico State, such as secretary and model, are service-oriented, and “follow a model derived from patriarchal ideology and a work deci-sion that is biological in nature, through which women are assigned to activities‘proper to their sex.’ ”

“Proper” activities for Mexican women may continue to be more limited thanfor their male counterparts. In a study on the concept of female mental illness inmodern Mexican society, Lagarriga Attias (1996:89) argues that “through theconceptions of mental illness suffered by women, we can better comprehend theimages our culture creates about the nature of the feminine condition.” Notingan elevated incidence of insanity among women (versus men) in Mexican soci-ety, Lagarriga Attias suggests that this may be due to the fact that women are notallowed to ignore their social obligations and duties as women, and that, in all



social classes, Mexican women are born into a culture in which to be a woman isto be devalued (Lagarriga Attias 1996:90).

The tendency in colonial and modern Spanish to usesalirseto refer to women’sactions appears to be yet another articulation of these patriarchal ideals and lim-itations, though less obvious and, because of this, perhaps more pervasive. Itseems, however, that these gender differences insalirse use may be levelingout – perhaps owing to a change in hegemonic discourse, or perhaps owing todifferences in the nature of the data; male referents slowly gained in relativefrequency, and inanimates appeared as possible referents for the first time in mydata from the 20th century.14

C O N C L U S I O N S

I have looked at the ways in whichsalir(se) variation in Mexican Spanish isaffected by and reflects societal gender norms. I found a notably higher use ofthe pronominal form among female speakers. This difference was in partexplained by different choices made by women and men both in semantic con-tent and in topic of conversation. While women were more likely to speak aboutunexpected situations in which the subject is defying sociocultural restrictionsor permanent abandonment, men were more likely to talk about cost and results.Furthermore, while women preferred female referents, men preferred inanimatereferents as topics. Interestingly, despite the fact that this study focused only onthe use of one particular lexical item, the tendencies in topic preferences foreach sex are in line with broader language-and-gender theories, which maintainthat women are more likely to talk about people (or personal topics), while menare more likely to talk about things (or impersonal topics) (Coates 1993:118–19).

Alongside gender differences in the use ofsalir(se), I also found diachronicevidence for a favoring of female referents with the pronominal form, a combi-nation that has been the most common since the 16th century. I hypothesize thatthis combination reflects the social reality in which Mexican women lived andcontinue to live, in which female behavior is more constrained and thus morelikely to be seen as violating “the natural order of events.” This “natural order”may differ across classes, races, and generations, but it is ultimately reflected inrepeated patterns in social communication or interaction such as writing ordiscourse.

These findings have implications both for linguistic theories of gender andfor general cognitive grammar and pragmatics. My results support the hypoth-eses that women and men tend to employ different pragmatic options in dis-course, and that these options reflect the social realities in which these speakerslive. Moreover, these results show that, just as Maldonado 1999 suggests, evensuch small grammatical items such assecannot be reduced to semantic or otherlinguistic factors alone. Instead, they must be considered as a functional tool thatsocially positioned individuals use in order to both express and create a particu-



lar social reality. In the case ofsalir(se), gender seems to be an important andtelling factor in this creation.

N O T E S

* I would like to thank Melissa Axelrod, Kathy McKnight,Language in Societyeditor Jane Hill,and two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions on this article.

1 By “discourse,” I mean “the loose, unplanned, informal mode of communication in language”(Hopper & Traugott 1993:168).

2 Spanish is not unique in possessing this construction. Languages as diverse as Classical Greek,Hungarian, A. Quechua, Lingala, Pangwa, Guugu Yimidhirr, Fula, Old Norse, Indonesian, andRumanian have similar constructions (Kemmer 1994:198).

3 Quotations from Spanish-language sources are translated by the author.4 All word count information for DLNE comes from Torres Cacoullos 2002.5 For a detailed description of the documents included, see Company Company 1994.6 For more information on GoldVarb, see Rand & Sankoff 1990.7 TheDiccionario del español usual de México(Lara Ramos 1996:802) offers a similar, though

less complete, definition ofsalirse, giving two meanings: 1) “to discontinue a certain behavior, lineof action, or function, certain procedure:salirse del tema‘change the topic,’salirse de la norma‘stray from the norm,’salirse del carril‘go out of the lane;’ ” and 2) “for a liquid to pass the limits ofwhat contains it, or for what contains it to have some rupture through which the liquid passes. . . .”This dictionary also gives a definition for the phrasesalirse con la suya, which is defined as “To doas one wishes against what seems fitting to others.”

8 These correspond to definitions 10, 18, 26, 27, 29 and 36, and 17 and 19 of DRAE 2001,respectively.

9 The extension of the use of the pronominal form in this context in New Mexico could be due toan acceleration of an internal change, in this case ofsalirseextension, resulting from the situation ofcontact with English (see Silva-Corvalán 1994).

10 Examples will be cited in the following manner: (Corpus document0page, year).11 Had I chosensalir, GoldVarb would have produced the mirror image of Table 2, with those

factors that favor disfavoring and vice versa, but with the same factor groups selected as significantand in the same order.

12 Note that the GoldVarb results, with ap value of .012, did not reach statistical significance atthe .01 level, but did at a .05 level, most likely owing to the small sample size. The term “parallelprocessing,” for this study, refers to presence of the same or the same expected clitic within thepreceding two clauses.

13 In a recent study, which includedir(se) ‘to go’, salir(se), venir(se)‘to come’, bajar(se) ‘todescend’,subir(se)‘to ascend’,quedar(se)‘to stay’ andcaer(se)‘to fall’, Aaron 2003 found a sim-ilar effect with these constructions in northern New Mexican Spanish.

14 The possibility of inanimate referents, however, does seem to go back to the beginning of theenergetic-absolute contrast withsalir(se), as evidenced by the 1611 dictionary definition (Covarru-bias 1943), in whichsalirsecan also mean ‘to spill’. I found no evidence of this use, however, in theDLNE, perhaps owing to the infrequency of this context in the situations discussed in the documentsexamined.

15 All p values given, except in Table 3, were obtained through chi-square tests.

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(Received 22 August 2002, revision received 20 June 2003, accepted 3 August 2003)



The gendered use of salirse in Mexican Spanish: Si … · The gendered use of salirse in Mexican Spanish: Si me salía yo con las amigas, se enojaba JESSI ELANA AARON Department of

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